


Sunflower Sutra

by KittyAugust (KittyAug)



Series: SPN Prompts & Challenges [10]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Allen Ginsberg - Freeform, Alley Blow Jobs, Alley Sex, American Literary Canon, Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Kissing in the Rain, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 11:26:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5088965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyAug/pseuds/KittyAugust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Cas get caught in the rain on a routine hunt, what follows involves Allen Ginsberg, and sunflowers, and smut. Not necessarily in that order.</p><p><a href="http://destielsmutbrigade.tumblr.com/">Destiel Smut Brigade Fall Challenge:</a> Kiss in the Rain</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunflower Sutra

It is raining. And it’s _been_ raining for days.

The leaves have started to turn, copper edged and rust rough and the air is colder than it was last week. It’s that steady, relentless kind of rain. The sort that just doesn’t let up and stains the ground all one shade of wet monochrome grey. The sort of rain that isn’t quite hail or snow storm but tastes of it. Hints at worse weather to come, it rolls in over the plains picking up dust and fallen leaves that add dark layers to the petrichor. And once it settles in it just doesn’t leave.

Cas shivers, and Dean gives in. He reaches out and grabs the former angel by the sleeve, and pulls him in closer, into the small doorway and its meagre shelter, closer to Dean. Cas is startled at first, he’s not used to Dean even touching him in public, not anymore. He staggers a moment then goes with it, follows Dean’s lead - like he always does. He lets Dean pull him a little further out of the drenched alley.

“C’mere,” Dean says gruffly, voice taut and lower than usual due to proximity more than genuine frustration. Well, not that kind of frustration anyway. “You’ll catch your death if you stand in the open like that, and we’ll still miss the rugaru with you dripping away like that.”

Cas’s eyes are bright, clear, water-edged street lights reflecting back at Dean. There’s only inches left in this tight, damp little space. He’s mere inches away. Even in the rain, even human, Cas still smells like sunshine and now there’s a hint of clean fabric and Dean’s soap too.

“Being cold or wet does not actually increase the likelihood of a human catching a virus, Dean.”

“No?” Dean says, and even he can hear the smile in it.

“No,” Cas agrees, grave and gravel soft. He’s teasing, and Dean has this tight pinch of fondness deep in his gut. So deep it hurts to feel it. Like a little wild thing scrabbling at his heart and lungs, battering his ribs with desires he’s never figured out what to do with.

They’re so close, two big men huddled in a small blocked up doorway, Dean can feel Cas’s breath when he speaks. He can see the way Cas’s chest rises and falls with it, so newly human that he’s still not used to it. If Dean placed his hand on that damp white fabric he’d be able to feel the heart beating too. Signs of life in the dark.

He does reach out, then. Can’t frigging help it. Like a magnetic attraction. It always has been, but since he gave in once- it’s gotten harder and harder to resist. It’s nothing really. He just brushes the rain off Castiel’s face because it looks too close to tears. He’s never seen Cas cry, doesn’t think he ever wants to. It’s meant to be nothing, but it’s something.

Problem is, once their skin touches, that invisible force ramps up. Like someone switched the power on and it’s an electromagnet, and all Dean’s got to fight it is his already battered will. Dean curls his fingers soft on Cas’s cheek, a little too tender to be platonic. A little too tender to resist. So, Dean stops resisting, he leans in close enough to touch. Close enough to kiss. They both go still, Dean can feel it in the air. That inevitable _something_ that’s always been there but just got worse in the last few weeks. The air stretches thin and his heart tries to out beat the rain. He can feel it in his chest. Can feel the distance between them as the moment stretches wide but the space closes in.

He can’t help it. He just leans that half inch further and kisses Cas. A light brush of a kiss, lips touch and breathing close. It’s hardly a kiss at all, mostly a whisper, but damn it feels good. It makes him hot inside, wound tight and tighter still, in the best possible way. It makes his lips ache for more, makes his chest clench and Cas’s eyes go wide. Dean pulls back a whole three inches. It’s all that’s left. It’s as far as he can run. Any further is suddenly impossible. His hand has made its way to the back of Cas’s neck, unbidden, and he leaves it there even as they move apart. His palm hot on Cas’s rain damp skin. He can feel Cas’s pulse, or maybe it’s his own. It’s racing, whoever it belongs too. Racing closer to an edge he thought he’d already jumped the hell off of.

“Dean,” Cas is breathless. Breathless because of Dean. That sends something hot through his veins despite the rain. “Dean, we’re _outside_.”

Cas says it like it is the most serious thing in the world. Like it matters. Like Dean kissing a dude in public might start the next apocalypse. And that’s Dean’s fault, like everything else broken and fucked up in their whole stupid lives. Dean told him, _not outside, Cas_ ; _not in public, Cas_. _Not in front of Sammy, Cas_. Always saying no even as his skin screams for yes.

“Yeah, we are.” Dean agrees. “Outside. In an alley, in the dark, hunting monsters, in the _rain_ , Cas.”

Then because he knows none of that makes sense to Cas, he kisses the fallen angel again, for real this time, and shuts them both up. Heart and head held still, caught in the indulgence of this fucked up thing he’s wanted more than wanting for far too fucking long. Pressed in close and hot, he wraps his arms around Cas and holds the hell on. He kisses Cas like he means it. Kisses him like a promise and a lie. Open mouthed and blood hot. Warm lips and rain cooled skin. When Cas goddamn growls and presses up closer Dean feels something break inside him. A wall crumbling down under the pressure of lust-driven desire, his anxiety crushed under the pressure of Cas being this damn close. The pressure of Cas wanting him back. It’s overwhelming and cuts through edges he never knew he had.

It is an act of worship, pure and simple. The ground beneath their feet becomes hallowed. A filthy alley in the middle of an even dirtier city becomes a sacred space in the time between breath and touch. It’s heaven in the dark. A paradise against the night.

Cas gasps against Dean’s lips and it’s all he needs to turn this from dirty to filthy, he arches up, closer than close. Dean drags his body against Cas, captures another gasping breath between his lips. Cas kisses back like this is all he’s ever wanted. And they’ve done this before, more often lately, but every time it throws Dean off guard. The way Cas reacts, the fury of him, the unrepentant eager desire in his sacred skin. The rain pours on and Dean gets his free hand on an angel’s ass. Jimmy might have been human but Dean swears he feels Heaven’s touch in this creation. This perfection under his hands is proof of something. Something mighty and endless and pure. The world might be falling down around them, metaphorically and maybe literally, but when isn’t it in their godforsaken lives. Why not fall together. Why not fall into this.

Cas bites Dean’s lip, soft but firm, teeth on flesh. He always was a quick study. And now it’s Dean’s turn to make that sound in the back of his throat. All lust hot longing. Something close to begging for more. Something close to surrender. Something close to the truth. Most of the time Dean hates how human Cas is now. How fragile, how lost and open he can look some nights. But right now, in this rush of a moment, he cherishes it. Right now he loves how warm Cas is, how his breath catches when Dean moves. He even loves the heavy weight of Cas’s arousal against his thigh. Maybe he likes that the most, who the hell knows. Whatever it is he aches for it, it thrums in his pulse. It’s almost an instinct, something written in his DNA, or etched on his soul. He burns with it, this wretched need for more. Once he starts he just doesn’t know how to let go. It’s worse than violence, it goes deeper than hunger or pain. He couldn’t resist this if he wanted to.

Having this kind of power over Cas, it’s a blessing and a curse. A thrill and a mortal fear. Dean gives in to the itch in his blood and starts to unwrap Cas’s belt despite the startled sound that elicits, maybe because of it. Cas’s head rolls back and Dean gets his lips and teeth on a neck laid bare just for him, kisses his throat, rougher and less practiced than he should be. Distracted by the blissful aching truth of it. Distracted by the way Cas moves, the way he arches up and rolls into every kiss, the ecstasy in his face, and the faith in his skin. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knows this is stupid. He knows they’re on a hunt. He needs to be alert. Every day of training in his life rebels against it. But something else yells out for it, something else, some part of Cas, it’s burrowed up into his spine and won’t let go. His lips are hot where Cas’s skin is clammy, his fingers burn where they touch, and he can’t help going for more. He can’t help the way this makes him feel or the way he wants to make Cas feel it too. He needs to share the fire under his skin, needs to feel Cas close and human and his. And it doesn’t matter if the damn monster gets away, because there's a monster inside Dean that shuts the hell up when Cas touches him like this. Winter is creeping up on them and every instinct Dean has tells him this heat is precious, tells him this is as close to perfect as he’ll ever get. And for once he grabs it, grabs Cas too and holds him closer than close.

When Dean gets a hand on Cas’s cock, it’s glory and it’s rapture, it’s ascendant. Because Cas has no shame, no qualms, at least not any that he didn’t learn to fake from Dean. He gives himself over. Gives himself over to lust, and skin on skin, and to Dean. Dean moans at that thought, and the way Cas melts like spring snow despite the fall rain. Dean is oddly aware of how rough his hand is compared to Cas’s cock. How rough he is compared to Cas. A hunter’s calluses on an angel’s skin, and that can’t be right. It shouldn’t feel as right as it does. It shouldn’t feel like coming home. But it does.

Dean can smell it in the air first, over the scent of wet stone and rain on concrete, almost hidden by the edge of sex and skin and sweat, but it’s there. The very last vestige of Cas’s grace stains the air in moments like this. Adds a genuine electric spark to the poetical ones in Dean’s head. Ozone and angel, just a taste of it, on the back of his tongue. It’s rare, and it’s buried deep, and Dean knows he has to really get Cas going to bring it out. It’s a victory in itself.

Dean has to bend his knees now, as his sucked and bitten kisses wend their way lower. Down Cas’s neck and onto his collarbone, Dean scratches a nail over the sensitive bump of Cas’s nipple. Cas makes a noise that would be a whimper on a lesser being. It’s beautiful, he’s beautiful, rain slick and lust raw. So Dean just keeps going, falls to his knees on the cracked and rain slick concrete like he hasn’t in… well like he hasn’t had to for a very long time. He looks up through his lashes, it’s coy, it’s an old game but the rules have changed. Because Cas doesn’t look back at him like he’s prey, doesn't look at him like a toy or a prize. Cas looks at him like a gift, like he’s precious and more than that, Cas looks at him like Dean is the holy thing. Like he’s Dean Winchester, and like that means something. He looks at Dean like it was worth it. Like _he_ was worth it.

Dean knows Cas loves him, didn’t always know why or how, or if Cas even knew what it meant. But he does know it. He’s always known it, and feared it, and dreamed it. Even when he denied it he knew it. He could always see it, in the way Cas looks at him sometimes. He could hear it, hidden under every second word they exchanged. And now he can taste it, when they kiss, when they stand close enough to breathe. It’s never been more clear than it is right now, however. Despite the smoke and the grime and the grit around them. Stupidly, he thinks of Ginsburg. His very own Sunflower Sutra. _You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!_ And he’s not sure who’s the poet and who’s the sunflower in that analogy. Maybe both and maybe neither. _Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?_ Cas looks at Dean like he never forgot the sun, like he found it in Dean’s eyes. Like he can read that dirty old poem writ large in Dean’s soul.

Dean blinks first, he looks away, ‘cause he can’t stand that much affection, even like this. Maybe especially like this. When his blood is humming in his veins, when there’s some kind of hellfire in his flesh, and a needy ache in his bones. When he’s got Cas’s cock in his hand and mere moments from his lips. He can’t take it. He’ll break apart on it. He’s already unraveling from a kiss, from the affection where Cas practically pets his damn hair. He’s a broken man, penitent before a fallen angel. Like a sinner before the gates of Heaven, or a back-alley confessional. He’s asked and asking for forgiveness in more ways than one. That isn’t all this is, though. This isn’t pleading, he's not begging, it’s barely even supplication, this is a prayer but it’s pure and simple. It’s faith and lust, and yeah alright maybe it’s love. It’s so many promises already broken or hopelessly held, twisting under his tongue. But most of all it’s here and it’s now. It's them. In the dark and the rain, all too human. Dean might burn for this again, but god damn him if right then and there it isn’t everything he’s ever wanted.

Cas makes this earthy hot sound when Dean licks his cock. Saliva slick and so damn good. Cas’s hips shudder, involuntarily, and Dean should train him out of it but there’s something about it. Something imploring and needy and desperate. Something that makes Dean want to give him this with all his soul and anything else as well. Everything else. Dean gets his free hand up under all those damp layers, gets it under Cas’s shirt. It’s mostly for him, Cas likes the feeling of Dean’s hands, but it’s Dean that needs it to ground him. Needs it to remind himself how close to human Cas is, even if he’ll never be fully human. It’s awesome and awe inspiring all at once. Angels might be dicks but Dean almost makes himself laugh when he thinks that this one is far from junkless. Then Cas’s hands twitch tight in Dean’s hair and it’s a reminder. His pulse thrumming fast and the skin and sex taste of Cas on his lips get him back into action, back into the moment.

If you’d told Dean 20 years ago that he’d love doing this he would have punched you. It’s true, though. He loves it. He loves the way Cas’s body moves, the little twitches, the shuddering gasps of breath. He loves the way Cas falls for it, falls for him, debauched and decadent and wanting. He loves the way Cas looks, eyes closed and head falling back, lets himself go, lays himself out on Dean’s tongue and into Dean’s hands. He loves the way Cas’s skin tastes, loves the tender pull on his lips, even loves the near choking weight on his tongue. Loves the suck and slide and pull of it. Dean Winchester, cockslut. His father would kill him, but here he is pulling an angel apart with his tongue and his throat and loving it.

Cas is hard and desperate and distracted and it’s the most exquisite thing he’s ever seen. He wants so much more and nothing else. He wants to touch and be touched. He wants to fuck and be fucked, he wants to scream for freedom. He wants to taken and be taken. He wants to hold on and never let go. But he wants Cas to let go. He wants to yank him gasping and burning down that final cliff of sexual glory. They’re trapped together in a twisted symphony of desire, a blissful aching truth, and Dean wants it to go on forever. But he wants it to get better too. He wants to let go and fall.

There’s some kind of poetry in that too.

Dean growls and hums and freaking purrs around Cas’s cock. Works him hard. Tells him wordlessly what he wants. And Cas gets it. Because Cas has always been able to understand Dean even when he didn’t want to. Maybe this is just another lost language to an angel, maybe he really can speak sex and Dean and endless hopeless faith. Speaks the languages of Dean’s body as well as the ones on his lips, even better when the two combine.

Dean can feel it, feels the rising tide of tension in Cas’s skin. Feels his balls clench tight and the throbbing pulls of it before it hits the back of his tongue. But he feels it in the air too. Feels the greasy tension of angelic grace, feels the way Cas breathes faster, feels the anticipation before the crescendo. Feels it somewhere inside too, like music or a fight, a moment before it happens, a moment before the angel comes and comes apart. Coming has always felt a bit like flying to Dean, and he’ll burn again if he can give that back to Cas. Even a semblance of it, in one incandescent second of freefalling freedom. He swallows it down and holds on, holds Cas close and deep. Closes his eyes even, and holds on to the moment. Breathing deep.

Cas twitches with the last moments of bliss, and Dean drags out every damn second of it. Because no matter how well he knows it, this still seems too good to be true. Too simple. Nothing that feels this good can last. Not in Dean’s Hell burnt wreck of a life.

Dean slides back and stands up slow. Still so close it burns. They’re flush against each other, still. Even as Cas breathes himself down, breathes through this crazy sun warm glow in the rain drenched dark. Dean thinks he can feel it to, feel the heat of Cas's come down and the sweet relief of his release. They're as close as a wish. Near enough that to share body heat and body bliss. About as far from November Rain as you can get while it pours down around you. Dean can't breath either, he should be pent up, but he's just intoxicated. Drunk from the touch of Cas's skin, drunk from being near him.

This time, Cas kisses Dean, his confidence quite rightly justified. This time it’s Cas that has a hand on the back of Dean’s neck and the other on his hip. Just this side of forceful, just this side of controlling the kiss. It’s so damn hot that Dean thinks it’s this that’ll kill him. Dean’s got his hands on Cas’s waist like some girl slow dancing at prom. He doesn’t care, he just digs in and holds on, hard enough to bruise. Cas doesn’t buck him off, doesn’t stop him, if anything he moans and moves into it. Moves against Dean with divine pressure. Dean hadn’t realised how turned on he was. Hadn’t thought about how close it is to painful. How close he is to coming just from this. Just from having Cas in his arms or on his tongue, just from having Cas this damn close to him. Rain wet and sex pliant. He’s like some kind of goddamn sex dream come to life. Rubbing off on an angel in an alley probably isn’t the worst or even the filthiest thing Dean has ever done, but it kind of feels like it. Dean pulls back and gasps for breath, gasps for the cold rain damp air and fills his lungs with hot sex sweat instead. Cas is looking at him again, looking at him like it means something. Like he knows it means something.

_And you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! A perfect beauty of a sunflower, a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!_

This moment is more Howl than Sutra, _who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,_ but here he is. Looking at the sun in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats, but thinking about sunflowers.

“It’s a beautiful poem, Dean.” And god, Cas’s voice, gravel and dust; lust, fire, and ash in his throat.

“I… you can’t hear that?” Dean says, more lost than before. Adrift on the river just like Ginsburg’s nameless new sodomites. Just like Ginsburg too.

“I can’t usually, but sometimes, like this-” Cas pulls him closer, sharp and jarringly good. “I can still hear it... fragments of your prayer. I thought you’d noticed?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, his own voice tattered on rain soaked kisses as much as the sex. He’d noticed the taste of grace on the air, he’d noticed the occasional spark flying more literally than usual. But he hadn’t thought about what else that might mean. Story of his life.

Cas kisses him again, like he can feel the melancholy snatching up on them. He stops it in its tracks, with his mouth. Kisses Dean slow and deep, awesome and good, kisses him like an answer. Dean feels his heart rate ricochet then stutter back to normal. Body trained to fight but repurposed in that moment to keep him balanced on a different kind of edge. Normal people don’t notice that sort of thing, even when an almost angel kisses them in the cold. Cas pulls away softly, Dean doesn’t chase his lips but he doesn’t let him go either. He rests their foreheads against each other, bodies still as close as they’re going to get outside, on a hunt.

“It’s Ginsburg,” Dean admits, in lieu of admitting anything else. Dean has always hidden the words that matter behind ones that don’t.

Dean can feel the way Cas is breathing, still has to breathe then despite his holy orgasm mojo thing. It’s a little labored, rough edged and matching the stuttered rhythm of Dean’s own too turned on to fully function breathing. It’s nice, which is not a word Dean normally associates with dirty alley sex. He can feel the edge of that desperate heat idling under his skin, ready at the surface edge to rise back up if Cas even looks at him the right way. He’s still thinking about seriously revving this thing back into gear when there’s a loud crash in the alley behind them.

"Shit."

Dean’s reaching for the flamethrower before his brain catches up to the sound, and Cas thank christ, has the sense of mind to pull back and try put himself back together. Dean steps forward, protective as ever. Doesn't think twice about throwing himself between Cas and whatever evil thing wants to try and get its fangs on them this week. When he sees who it is he almost laughs, from fear and shock as much as relief.

Turns out he didn’t have to be quite so defensive.

“Oh god, my eyes,” Sam yelps, startled and turning his back on them like a giant girl. Shit. Just play it cool Winchester.

“Don’t worry,” Dean says, masking his horror in bravado. “You missed all the good bits, Samantha.”

“You guys do know we’re in the middle of a hunt, right?” Sam whines back. He doesn’t sound angry, just… whiney. Like he knew. Like he isn't really surprised, just whining for the sake of it. Like normal. Sam always was the smart one.

“Yeah, good point 'bout the hunt, man. Shouldn’t you be out in front. Y'know, on watch?” Dean points out, very reasonably seeing as he's gotten caught out but still hasn’t gotten off in this whole thing. At least he’s still got his pants on. Not like Sam hasn’t seen worse, he tries to convince himself. Not with Cas, but he _has_ seen worse.

“Not really,” Sam admits, back still firmly turned, but Dean can hear the grin in his brother's voice now. “It already came out the front and I ganked it, I was coming to tell you we can go home.”

“I believe it is safe for you to turn around now,” Cas says, even more stiffly than usual. Oh, right, an eyeful of angelic cock covered in Dean’s spit probably isn’t at the top of Sammy’s favorite post hunt celebration list. Dean thinks he might have to add it to his though.

“No harm, no foul,” Dean says, grinning through the pain, and walks over to slap Sam on the shoulder. Hard. Could the kid’s timing be any worse? He forces himself to walk past Sam and lead the way out of the alley. The rain is stopping. He’s ramped up in a whole other way now. Just waiting for the ball to drop. Waiting for Sam to react. Or demand answers, or… something. It doesn’t come. Sam just rolls his eyes at him.

“I apologise,” Cas is saying as they both follow Dean back to the car. To Sam. Not to Dean, who is the one left hanging thank you very much. Then again maybe he’s planning to make it up to him. That’s hard when they’re going back to a shared motel room, though. At least Cas sounds a little nervous too, not as unnerved as Dean feels, but still. He’s not the only one waiting for Sam to do or say something. Anything else.

“Nah, don’t be,” Sam says. A little too jovial but no more than he always is when he knows Dean’s trying not be awkward about something. Is he laughing about this? “I know what he’s like, I should’ve been prepared. And I suppose sneaking up on you guys was a bit much. I’m sorry too.”

Dean can almost hear Cas smile back. They’re bonding. Great. Just friggin great.

“Hey,” Dean says, more gruffly than he meant to. “I’m right the hell here.”

“I know,” Sam says, and tromps smugly around to his side of the car. He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even think about offering Cas shotgun. He really is acting like nothing’s changed. Like he didn’t just see what he _had_ to have seen. Dean glares at him over the roof of the Impala but Sam either doesn’t notice or ignores him. What the actual fuck.

Cas, always more overtly aware of Dean, does glance over at him with a question in his eyes. He’s still not sure, never sure. Dean smiles at him, probably couldn’t have helped that if he’d wanted to. It must be reassuring because Cas relaxes almost imperceptibly, it untwists some knot in Dean’s spine a bit too. Something unbuckles between them.

The rain has stopped, but it’s still cold, the streetlights don’t make up for the sun. The leaves on the ground are gold and brown, and they shine in the watered down light. Like hidden treasure buried in the gutters. It’s quiet, and still, and cool, and unchanged. The way nothing but midnight in a midwestern October can be.

“Don’t get the seat wet,” Dean says. He means a whole lot more than that but Cas just nods and takes off his trenchcoat before getting in the car. His hair is still sticking out at all angles, and his cheeks are still slightly flushed. Dean gets a heady urge to just grab him and lay one on him right there in the parking lot, but that’s stupid and terrifying, and the moment passes.

There will be other moments though, that’s the whole damn point. There will be other half-poetic half-stolen seconds. _With the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies, good to eat a thousand years_ \- Maybe it doesn’t have to be butchery, if he just lets go and lets it friggin’ happen. Maybe that’s the truth he lost in tangled roots. Maybe it always was. Maybe that’s what Ginsberg, and Kerouac, and Hemingway, and Vonnegut have all been trying to say, all along. Howling into the void. Always talking about life, and food, and sex, and rage, like it meant something and nothing. Maybe it isn’t done yet, maybe it’s never done. Maybe Dean’s requiem doesn’t need to be quite so bleak. Maybe it’s worth the risk. Maybe nothing is. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

So it goes… And the sun also rises. Eventually.

Dean blinks off the oddly literary melancholy and throws himself into the car. Cas watches him, Sam’s already got his nose in a book. Like nothing changed. Dean cranks Metallica up loud enough to drown the silence. A different kind of poetry makes its way into his veins. If he drives all night they can be back in Kansas by daybreak. Nothing and everything changed, and everything has, and nothing ever will. The car purrs under the pedal.

 _And all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it._ Dean’s one of them. And Kerouac was right, _The evening star is drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old._ But there’s an ex-angel in the back seat and his brother’s already starting to doze, and the music is loud. Loud enough to cover the ache in his heart. And this Dean did find his father, even if he lost him again. And he found something else too, in the rain and the night and the dark corners of nowhere. On the road again. Dean’s finally going home, even though he maybe never left.

**Author's Note:**

> Kripke has said that Sam and Dean are a modern-gothic re-imagining of Sal and Dean from Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel _On The Road_. Sal was based on Kerouac, and Dean in turn was based on Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg's famously poly-bisexual lover. Ginsburg also turns up in _On The Road_ , as Carlo Marx.
> 
> Anyway, the point of all that is: in the poem _Sunflower Sutra_ , the poet (Allen Ginsburg) is sitting with Jack Kerouac and contemplating the train graveyard and, dirty and dusty but still brightly living within it, a single sunflower. The spoiler here is that this means Dean is the sunflower. He has to be. If the poet is Cas, and Kerouac is Sam, that only leaves the sunflower to be Dean. You have to be awful geeky in a number of ways to catch that one, so I hope the one other person in the world who gets it while reading, will forgive me for spelling it out for everyone else.
> 
> There are a lot of other literary references in here, not all italicised or direct quotes, mostly to the Beat Generation and the post-Vietnam ‘Great American Canon’. Dean canonically reads Vonnegut, and the rest just followed on from that! I even tried to write in a Beat inspired tone, hope it works for y'all.
> 
> * * *
> 
> This was a huge leap of faith on my part, much more overtly allegorical than anything else I've written. Not to mention the classic American Lit style was a huge challenge. I really, really hope it worked. Comments and feedback would mean the world on this one!
> 
> * * *
> 
> Tumblr: [kittyaugust.tumblr.com/](http://kittyaugust.tumblr.com/) (I take prompts and I don't bite... much)


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